Daniel Riccuito, main author of The Beauty of Terror, with Jennifer Matsui and myself, is incandescent with rage about changes Fangoria magazine made to the piece without consulting us. I’m slightly more philosophical, having been really horribly rewritten several times during my film and TV career. A shout-out here to the giftless bastards at Tern Television and to so-called director Crispin Whittier Whittell, whom I would like to shoot with a gun.

The people who butcher creative work are usually friendly, smiling people. They totally don’t get that they just mutilated something you cared about, and stole something that was rightfully yours. “Think of me as the kindly torturer,” Sid Sheinberg told Terry Gilliam while doing his best to rip the guts out of BRAZIL. These people look hurt when you tell them they destroyed something they didn’t understand. They look confused when you say you wish they’d asked. They made everything better without bothering us, so why aren’t we delighted? Of course, they only enjoy such freedom from doubt, such artistic carte blanche with other people’s labours because they are totally bereft of any creativity themselves.

Fangoria’s changes are tone-deaf, clumsy, anti-intellectual, humourless, and mostly unnecessary. But what makes them completely unacceptable is that they didn’t send a copy of the proposed alterations during the months the piece was waiting to see print. This kind of consultation ALWAYS happens. When I write for Electric Sheep, which is an online publication, the very thoughtful and precise editorial changes are always offered up to me to see if they’re acceptable. With Sight & Sound, or with Criterion liner notes, the same thing happens. Apart from being courteous, this is also efficient: if a writer has expressed themself unclearly, the editor’s attempt to fix the problem might not work — it may well take the writer’s input to clarify what the piece intended to say.

The GOOD NEWS is — you can read the original article at The Chiseler, here.

This is possibly of interest only to Daniel, Jennifer and myself, but I thought I’d run through the more egregious changes, just for the record.

A minor example: “Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment” becomes “The answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical attributes.” This is typical of the changes, where an interesting word choice is replaced with a mundane, hackneyed one.

A more complex one: “Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt.” This becomes, in Fangoria’s blood-smeared hands, “Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, and Sunday showcases a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent, summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt.” Which is hard to understand, as it seems to say that Steele is summoning and banishing her talent, using it to play the damsel and abandoning it when she plays the revengeful revenant. This is not only not what we meant, it’s not even what Fangoria means to say.

We wrote, “Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort.” This is following a reference to Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon, making the argument that Steele’s appearance has something in common with his hand-tinted special effects. Clearly the reference was deemed too obscure for the magazine’s public (though encouraging people to go look something up never struck me as a disservice to the reader). Chopping the Chomon line, Fangoria makes do with, “Where the actress’ Italian films are concerned, the experience is like watching silent movies of a sort.” The “of a sort” becomes bizarre and ungainly since it’s the first mention of silent cinema, and it’s not even really clear what is meant by “the experience” — the experience of watching them, presumably, but if so, why not say so?

The phrase “molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity,” which referred to Steele’s entire Italian career, is folded into a sentence about BLACK SUNDAY and forced to serve as a description of that film, which had only one cinematographer, Mario Bava.

Here’s one of my own sentences: “While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain.” This becomes “they liberated her from the constraints of Britain,” which is a different point, one less related to the beginning of the sentence, and the overall point explored in the next two paragraphs, which is about class.

My line “Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous” just gets chopped altogether, leaving the section to widdle out lamely. That was my best sentence!

Even a quote from the star herself is not safe from the editors’ “creativity” — “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.” “Negated” is replaced with “ignored.” As Matt Damon complains in THE INFORMANT! “How is that OK? That’s NOT OK.”

Or, there’s this: “amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids.” Fangoria couldn’t cope with such richness, apparently, so we get “amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is a walking shadow.” Pity the poor hack who, throwing out a complex phrase, must try to invent something of their own to replace it. I know, Shakespeare! That always works!

“Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League.” References to British new wave bands of the eighties are another thing Fangoria’s readership are not expected to be able to cope with, so the sentence is lopped. “Obscuring” is subbed in for the too high-brow “occluding,”

This, I thought, was one of my more useful paragraphs. “Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.”

“The story may be a kind of postmodern dream-jumble of countless Gothic narratives, but its visuals are stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin.” Shorter, yes. But better? Any good at all? “Visuals” are always “stunning,” aren’t they?

Another line from Barbara gets rejigged: “…and faces that are like spells they look so informed,” becomes “and faces like spells.” Minor, but completely unethical unless you add the dreaded […] to make it clear you’re monkeying with a direct quote.

“And yet we’ll never know quite how seriously the filmmakers approached these farragoes. They fuse the kind of outrageous plot twists pioneered by Psycho and Les Diaboliques with all the gothic trappings familiar from The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, and Poe’s morbid, overheated imagination with the new sexual liberality of sixties cinema, already curdled into something icky and sadistic and necrophile, as if decades closeted by the censor had fermented some kind of fetid corruption infecting every glance. The dialogue is always unspeakable in any language (hence, perhaps, all that dubbing, as a kind of disinfectant/alibi), while the plots collapse with the impact of a single breath of air, and characterization is strictly puerile. But the potent sex-death brew is nevertheless intoxicating, the visuals sleek and seductive, and the eyes follow you about the room.”

This gets rendered down into:

“Freda and his contemporaries fused the kind of outrageous plot twists pioneered by Psycho and Les Diaboliques with all the gothic trappings familiar from The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, and Poe’s morbid, overheated imagination with the new sexual liberality of sixties cinema, already curdled into something icky and sadistic and necrophilic, as if decades closeted by the censor had fermented some kind of fetid corruption infecting every glance. […] The potent sex-death brew is nevertheless intoxicating, the visuals sleek and seductive […].”

““Oh, Riccardo Freda! We had our own private opera going,” Steele recalls.” This becomes “Riccardo Freda and I had our own private opera going,” which is, on the one hand, less exciting and expressive, and on the other, not what Barbara Steele actually said, ever.

“A desperate thing to do – like fighting a war – so everyone became emotionally invested on-set, and the atmosphere translated quite powerfully; yes, I’d say the results of all that apparent chaos wound up registering in the movie.” This gets chopped down to a couple of phrases, which is permissible in principal, but why would you want to lose all that good stuff, coming straight from the star’s mouth?

“The villain’s demise is superbly absurd, as he’s sealed within a cartoonish effigy, which makes him look like the lost, Goth member of the Banana Splits (original line-up: Drooper, Fleagle, Snorky, Bingo and Scabies).” By now I’m sure you can guess what got cut here.

“Despite a Scooby Doo/psychological ending eschewing the supernatural, this is one of the most extreme, delirious Italian Gothics, and despite a plot that doesn’t ultimately make a lick of sense, it comes closer to being a proper film than any of them – Francesco de Masi’s beautiful score lifts it out of pulp territory altogether at times.” I think that’s fair comment, though admittedly I should have fixed those two “despites,” bundling the provisos together. That’s just the sort of mistake a good editor can help with. But the final version is weirdly weak: “…this is one of the most extreme, delirious Italian Gothics and Francesco de Masi’s beautiful score lifts it out of pulp territory at times.” Without the “altogether” at the end, that’s a very watery statement to end a paragraph on.

“As soon as we meet the gardener, a hulking near-mute, we anticipate greenhouse shenanigans, given Babs’ history in these things,” — Fangoria drops the “Babs” but replaces it with a blurry “her” despite the fact that Steele’s name hasn’t appeared since the start of the previous sentence. This is exactly the kind of thing — noun/pronoun alternation — that an editor should be able to carry off invisibly.

“Laughter disrupts the dream-flow the picture aims at, but without completely staunching it, so the time passes in hypnagogic free-fall, that too-tired-to-sleep delirium when little jolts keep sparking you into reality, only to slump back to somnolence as the movie drains life and reason from you.” This is cut completely.

“Plywood characters totter through Bava’s puppet theater, crossing from day to night in a single cut, wielding candelabras that cast impossible shadows (how can a light source cast its own shadow?), spouting wooden dialogue from their wooden lips, with only the invading force of Satanism offering any recognizable human vivacity. Steele’s witch is not only fully justified in her revenge, as established in scene one, she’s the only figure with meat on her bones (and we see how it gets there, in a gruesome “re-incarnation” which renders the word literally): getting back into the skin. Exacting her pound of flesh.” Gone: anything that addresses the “flaws” in Bava’s filmmaking is unacceptable, I suspect.

“Fangoria’s grease pencil doodles on the margins, which somehow made its way into the final draft, failed to deliver either clarity or brevity to the final product. Instead, we get a somewhat clunking, rhythmless hot mess mimeograph of the original. This version has visible Cheetoh stains over the once legible prose, as if some suburban dungeon master was tasked with the editing job after replying to a “Make money at home” banner ad on Craig’s List. Stare at them long enough, and you’ll start to sprout visible shoulder blade and knuckle hairs.”

Here’s a bit of welcome news — a spanking-new Blu-ray of Mario Bava’s BLACK SABBATH, with essay by me.

I first saw this film in Vienna, on VHS, dubbed into German. Fiona and I were visiting friends, and I dropped into a vid store to see if they had anything not available back home. DIE DREI GESICHTER DER FURCHT looked too good, and too cheap, to pass up, even though I knew I wouldn’t understand a word of the dub. It proved to be the American cut of the film, which needlessly rearranges the episodes and jettisons Karloff’s magnificent send-off/send-up at the end, but the film still worked its magic. It’s scarier when you watch it someplace that’s not your home, actually.

I hadn’t been too taken with BARON BLOOD on VHS from Redemption at this point; childhood viewings of MASK OF SATAN and LISA AND THE DEVIL had left me amused and bemused respectively; but I’d acquired a really ratty tape of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, and that had impressed me no end, even with all the murders cut by the British censor. From this point on, I was a fan.

Like his Gothic spookfest THE GHOST, Riccardo Freda’s MACISTE IN HELL begins with a witch-burning in Scotland. As is traditional in these affairs (dating back directly to MASK OF SATAN, but beyond that to, I guess, I MARRIED A WITCH) the witch curses the townspeople who are about to immolate her.

A title tells us that a hundred years has passed, and suddenly an outbreak of madness is afflicting the women of “Loch Laird” — no reason why the curse should take a century to come into effect, except that it’s impressive yet inexpensive to say “100 years later” in a film of this kind.

And now Charley Law, a young cavalier, rides up with his betrothed, a descendant of the original witch, planning to honeymoon in the bat-infested ancestral castle. An angry mob of torch-wielding villagers promptly batters down the door using one of the few un-tossed cabers in Scotland, and takes his bride into jolly old custody. It looks like she’s going to become a barbecue like her ancestor —

And then Maciste — former Carthaginian slave in CABIRIA (1914), but since then a fair-skinned righter-of-wrongs in a geographically diverse series of 60s peplums (pepla? what’s the plural here?) — rides up. Nobody questions the abrupt presence of a bodybuilder in a loincloth in 18th century Scotland, they don’t even ask him his name. They just seem to understand. That’s us Scots — an understanding people.

Since we’re in Loch Laird, I’m going to start calling him MacChesty. He’s a sort of naked Lone Ranger figure, and he promptly descends into Hell (located beneath a local cursed tree) to sort things out. This involves MacChesty wrestling a lot of stuffed animals and quizzing Sisyphus and Prometheus, making inquiries, like Columbo in baby oil.

Kirk Morris, in the lead, brings pecs and an Elvis sneer to the part, along with the towering screen magnetism of a polystyrene boulder.

Most of the animal action involves intercutting fake snakes, eagles and lions with the real thing — the live, but very sleepy lion is actually a lioness in drag, adorned with a fake mane. Freda, who is absolute tops in my list of genius-or-idiot? filmmakers, boldly cuts back and forth between Kirk Morris with his frosted highlights earnestly throttling products of the taxidermist’s art in graphic close-up, to longshots where the animals are slightly more animate. Too animate — after MacChesty “kills” the lion, it can be seen contentedly blinking and flapping its ears.

Freda is a filmmaker who loves special effects, but want us to appreciate just how “special” they are, by lingering upon them until their artifice becomes wholly transparent. See also the car crash at the start of A DOPPIA FACCIA, which quite unnecessarily rubs our noses in the substitution of a toy car for the real thing, and even jump-cuts a few tiny explosions in for good measure. “Audacious” doesn’t begin to describe it — and I truly don’t know if Freda is expressing his contempt for the material, or the audience, or a childlike love of magic tricks, or sheer helplessness in the face of a low budget (he began his career with expensive historical epics in the Mussolini era).

But even more thrilling is the fight with Goliath. Goliath laughs at MacChesty, so MacChesty tosses a caber at him. Then we get a great, audiacious, forced-perspective fight between Goliath, a large-ish actor, and some kind of muscular child or jockey doubling for Kirk M.

All the tricks are bold and cunning, and all of them are immediately transparent — my favourite is this one, where Morris stands far enough behind Goliath so he’ll look smaller, and a pair of small plastic hands pretend to throttle the chucklesome titan.

F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, but I reckon he was really talking about Italian muscle pics. To pad this one out, we get a montage of Maciste’s greatest hits since 1960, which further develops Freda’s genius for overt, eye-popping juxtapositions, since more of the movies sampled feature different actors playing MacChesty.

The original Maciste, Bartolomeo Pagano, bowed out in 1927. In 1960 the character came back in the form of Mark Forest, who relayed it to a variety of similarly-bulbous he-beings — surely there’s a parallel there with the way German cinema after the war revived characters like Mabuse from its pre-Fascist past, as if to forge a continuity that circumvented the problematic era. At any rate, I’m glad they did, and Freda, the one Italian cineaste who truly rejected neo-realism and everything it stood for, was a natural recruit to the genre.